TeaBaggers, plain ol' GOP nuts battle to a draw

Voters routed state Reps. Delwin Jones and Norma Chavez on Tuesday, turned back former state Rep. Rick Green's bid for a spot on the Texas Supreme Court and handed victories to at least three candidates who appeared to benefit from the Tea Party insurgency in Texas. ... Republican voters in Lubbock and four other counties ousted long-time state Rep. Jones in favor of Charles Perry, a Tea Party organizer who campaigned for change and apparently got voters worked up about his candidacy: The runoff drew 17,501 voters — more than most primaries in March turned out.

Here's an Ode to Delwin Jones. Involuntarily retired from public service again at 86, he first served in the Texas House in 1965 (as a Democrat then), was swept out in the '70's when the Panhandle led the charge of the Reagan Democrats to the GOP, and returned in 1989 as a born-again Republican. So long and thanks for all the fish.

In fact the wins for TeaBaggers mostly came in in WTX, and certainly from the rural parts of the state. (Quico Canseco -- who hosted a phone bank for Scott Brown back in January -- won the right to lose to Ciro Rodriguez in CD-25 in the fall.) The best news of the day came in the loss of true lunatic Rick Green in his bid to join the other slightly-less-extreme-wingnuts on the Texas Supreme Court, and another social conservative dispatched from the SBOE. Those are defeats for the Texas Tea-liban faction. Some are still celebrating, of course.

In Harris County, results appear similarly muddled from the starboard perspective:

Depending upon your point of view, Harris County is either the leader of the social conservative movement in Texas or is the millstone around the neck of the Republican Party of Texas, slowly choking off the oxygen and turning the state purple. In the largest runoff turnout in a decade, Harris County voters took a page from Nancy Reagan's playbook and just said no to broadening the base of the party.

That won't slow Dan Patrick down from performing purity tests however, because Republicans are much more scared of the Tea Party phenomenon than Democrats are. Ick-Rot. Gotsta love it. Thanks, Big Jolly.

Here is a fair warning for Texas Democrats: get your shit together. It's going to be uphill and against the wind as it is, and with continuing nonsense from the Right appealing to the lowest common intelligence denominator, you need to get. on. your. game.

Not Elena Kagan

She would move the SCOTUS to the right, especially as it regards executive branch authority.

It is far from clear who Obama will chose to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, but Elena Kagan, his current Solicitor General and former Dean of Harvard Law School, is on every list of the most likely replacements.  Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog has declared her "the prohibitive front-runner" and predicts:  "On October 4, 2010, Elena Kagan Will Ask Her First Question As A Supreme Court Justice."  The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin made the same prediction.

The prospect that Stevens will be replaced by Elena Kagan has led to the growing perception that Barack Obama will actually take a Supreme Court dominated by Justices Scalia (Reagan), Thomas (Bush 41), Roberts (Bush 43), Alito (Bush 43) and Kennedy (Reagan) and move it further to the Right.  Joe Lieberman went on Fox News this weekend to celebrate the prospect that "President Obama may nominate someone in fact who makes the Court slightly less liberal," while The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus predicted:  "The court that convenes on the first Monday in October is apt to be more conservative than the one we have now."  Last Friday, I made the same argument:   that replacing Stevens with Kagan risks moving the Court to the Right, perhaps substantially to the Right (by "the Right," I mean:  closer to the Bush/Cheney vision of Government and the Thomas/Scalia approach to executive power and law).

This is bad news for us progressives. The more I learn, the more Glenn Greenwald is making me nauseous.

Consider how amazing it is that such a prospect is even possible.  Democrats around the country worked extremely hard to elect a Democratic President, a huge majority in the House, and 59 Democratic Senators -- only to watch as the Supreme Court is moved further to the Right?  Even for those who struggle to find good reasons to vote for Democrats, the prospect of a better Supreme Court remains a significant motive (the day after Obama's election, I wrote that everyone who believed in the Constitution and basic civil liberties should be happy at the result due to the numerous Supreme Court appointments Obama would likely make, even if for no other reason).

There will, of course, be some Democrats who will be convinced that any nominee Obama chooses is the right one by virtue of being Obama's choice.  But for those who want to make an informed, rational judgment, it's worthwhile to know her record.  I've tried here to subject that record to as comprehensive and objective an assessment as possible.  And now is the time to do this, because if Kagan is nominated, it's virtually certain that she will be confirmed.  There will be more than enough Republicans joining with the vast majority of Democrats to confirm her; no proposal ever loses in Washington for being insufficiently progressive (when is the last time such a thing happened?).  If a Kagan nomination is to be stopped, it can only happen before her nomination is announced by Obama, not after.

More Greenwald, in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! ...

Elena Kagan actually has very little record to speak of that would enable anybody to know where it is that she falls on the political spectrum.

And I think that issue, the fact that she has so little record, is disturbing in and of itself. I mean, why would progressives or Democrats, with an opportunity to replace somebody like Justice Stevens, possibly want to take a huge risk of appointing somebody to the Court whose judicial philosophy can’t really be discerned, because she’s spoken out almost never on most of the key constitutional and legal questions of the day? And that even includes, over the last decade, when there was an assault on the Constitution and the rule of law by the George Bush administration, and virtually every law professor, academician, anyone of note in the legal community, spoke out against what it was that Bush and Cheney were doing. She was completely silent. You can’t find a single utterance from her, in writing or orally, where she expressed a view one way or the other on the radical executive power claims of the Bush administration.

And what little there is to see comes from her confirmation hearing as Solicitor General and a law review article she wrote in 2001, in which she expressed very robust defenses of executive power, including the power of the president to indefinitely detain anybody around the world as an enemy combatant, based on the Bush-Cheney theory that the entire world is a battlefield and the US is waging a worldwide war.

...

Well, we know that this administration loves the idea of pleasing conservatives, and anybody who is pleasing to conservatives is somebody who is much more attractive as a political appointee than somebody who is perceived as liked by the left. ...

So, Elena Kagan is perceived as someone who is very good at accommodating right-wing perspectives. She did when she was the dean of Harvard Law School. And at her confirmation hearing for Solicitor General, Republicans couldn’t praise her lavishly enough. I mean, she had a colloquy with Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, where they were in complete agreement on virtually every issue involving terrorism and executive power. And even the furthest right-wing polemicist, like Bill Kristol and Ed Whelan, who currently writes for National Review and was a lawyer in Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, have praised her quite, quite emphatically as someone whose views on national security and terrorism and civil liberties they find quite palatable.

... And simply politically, it’s easier to get confirmed someone who’s perceived as being, and who is, a moderate, or even a conservative, than it is to get someone confirmed who is a liberal.

Senate Republicans have already set this one up. They'll fight anyone who is perceived by them as 'unacceptable'. Obama has no stomach for another fight in the Senate and neither does Harry Reid. (Although this is welcome news.)

Personally I'm going to steel myself for yet another unpalatable Obama decision.

Incarcerating debt in Harris County

(Open Source Dem contributes the following as my business continues to slow my own posting. If you wish to comment send me an e-mail ... that contact data is in my profile. For reading on background consult these two posts from Scott Henson's Grits for Breakfast, "Incarceration rate is a dysfunction indicator" at Informed.org  -- enjoy its TeaBagger slant; this from John Floyd and this from Tom Kirkendall.)

The high incarceration rate is more an executive or legislative than a judicial issue. More immediately, it is the other side of the coin from the low and biased political participation rate which could blow Democrats away this fall. Other than full employment for lawyers, what will our entire ticket be running on in November?

What one concrete platform plank will deliver Harris County Demnocrats a majority in county government despite opposition from the other party in county or, for that matter, city government?

Building and staffing jails is the main focus of county government after roads and bridges, before even providing public financing private development of commercial real estate, entertainment venues, or mega-churches. Buying vehicles, and recently computers, is in fourth place. The only technical proficiency we exhibit in any of this is paying for it with debt, serviced by regressive and indirect taxes.

Our core competency in government appears to be “press”, “clerical”, “optics” or “cosmetics” -- nothing like public health, public works, public safety, or public finance. These are all in the hands of private consultants or public employee unions.

Moreover, our involvement in all of this is little more than deals. Not plans, not standards ... deals.  No Democrat in county or city office is against any deal that benefits the main contributors to both parties. We cannot even exploit a “bidding war”.  Annise Parker made some noises about the 'one jail/two arenas' deal, but capitulated in the end. I sort of thought maybe we would get a dog bone out of that deal in the form of a public defender program, but I see no sign of that now.

What did we get? Chump change, I expect.

Once Democratic and Republican office-holders are all “read-in” and “bought-off” every deal goes through unanimously.

This is epitomized by the unusable jail ($68 MM) at the intersection of Commerce and Austin. Tilman Fertitta’s rumored amusement park may set a new record for absurdity in government, beyond even Bob Lanier’s Giant Sewage Pump.

Nobody in jail over any of that; both parties utterly complicit.

Politically, the problem with this bipartisan concession-tending and collusive bargaining is that it leaves the dominant party in Harris County free to raise money as the ruling party while running as the opposition party. We are left on the sidewalk holding the bag, wringing our hands, and apologizing for a government we are no more than decoration in.

I fail to see how we rouse the “new base” or “surge” voters by telling them we are smarter and nicer than the other candidates, mailing out the same sort of family portraits, and promising to do precisely nothing in return for their straight-ticket votes.

We are furnishing little more than a racial medley of groundskeepers and paper-shufflers for the bond lawyers, land developers, slumlords, and car dealers who literally own our debt-driven county and city government. The debt and derivative book -- a secret hiding in plain sight -- drives everything.

If the Tea Party/GOP runs on repudiating public debt, don’t be surprised if they win. Democrats did exactly that here in 1874. I am not for that today, but only because the IMF has other third-world regimes to worry about.

The Tea Party/GOP program makes no sense fiscally at any echelon of government. But, then neither does ours, assuming we even have a program other than whatever the usual suspects push past the Chamber of Commerce and onto our office-squatters.

At least the Chamber gets dues. We have a “brand”, but they have a lien.

The Weekly Wrangle

Barbecue grills and air conditioners are getting fired up; bluebonnets and baseball are in the air, crawfish are being boiled, suntan lotion is being slathered. Here are the weekly spring-at-long-last highlights from the Texas Progressive Alliance.

At Texas Vox, our thoughts remain with the victims of the West Virginia mining disaster, the worst mining accident in 25 years.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants to know why Republicans like Victoria's DA Steve Tyler, Nueces County's DA Anna Jimenez and (who could forget) Alberto Gonzales abuse their offices?

The Texas Cloverleaf thinks Rick Perry is eyeing 2012 before 2010 is even over with.

WhosPlayin is watching the situation in Flower Mound, where a group of citizens successfully petitioned to have an oil and gas drilling moratorium put on the ballot only to get some mostly frivolous ethics charges filed against them by a former Town Councilman.

Continuing his examination of partisan voting trends, Off the Kuff looks at how voting changed in judicial races between 2002 and 2006.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson has an update as the runoff to determine the challenger to Rep. Diana Maldonado approaches: HD-52 GOP Runoff - issues take a back seat.

Bay Area Houston compares Sarah Palin's intelligence on safe sex and nuclear disarmament.

They're everywhere! They're everywhere! Emissions, which are really toxins, are throughout the entire Barnett Shale area. Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS.

McBlogger loves it when Bill Hammond of the Texas Association of Business let's Teh Stupid flow freely.

FOX News' 24-hour "War of the Worlds"-styled fearmongering caught the attention of PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

This week on Left of College Station Teddy reports on how the campaign in the Republican primary for Texas Congressional District 17 has turned negative. Also, Teddy takes a first look at the College Station City Council Place 2 candidates and at the Bryan City Council Single Member District 3 candidates. Left of College Station also covers the week in headlines.

Libby Shaw asks a simple question over at TexasKaos -- So, How will Rick Perry deliver access to affordable health care to Texas? . She points out that "According to new federal regulations, Rick Perry and the health insurance companies in Texas have 90 days to deliver a plan that will cover uninsured Texans".

Neil at Texas Liberal posted about an '80's icon: Disco Inferno!Learn The Interesting History Of Disco Music Despite the bad historical reviews disco receives, a new book says that the music was an important social indicator in a time of societal gains for women and gays.

The 1965 Houston Astros in 2010

Last night's turn-back-the-clock promotion was greatly anticipated by this fan, and we got to Minute Maid Park yesterday in plenty of time to receive the freebie, a shooting-star jersey similar to the ones the team wore when they broke in the gleaming new Astrodome 45 years ago.

Jimmy "Toy Cannon" Wynn, Larry Dierker, and a handful of others who took the field in '65 were on hand to sign autographs and reminisce. The Jumbotron was in black-and-white for the entire evening and the original Astrodome organist replaced the loud rock and country music normally heard between innings and during pitching changes. See more photos here and here.

But the '10 'Stros played like the '65 version, losing 9-6 to the Phils on the strength of a mammoth shot by Ryan Howard and better bullpen pitching after old-timer-in-waiting Jamie Moyer left the game. 

One of the things I really like about Drayton McLane's stewardship of the Astros has been his consistent respect and celebration of the franchise's history. The Bagwell and Biggio retirements over the past couple of seasons, and last night's ceremony as well, serve to provide a real link for those of us who grew up with this team.

But one of the things I really don't like about Drayton McLane has been his consistently poor personnel decisions, from GMs to managers to free agents (anybody remember Doug Drabek and Calvin Swindell? Start there and come forward). They are currently 0-6 on the season, can't hit a lick and are woefully talent-thin on the mound. It's going to be a very long season for these guys if they continue to be as dreadful as they have been so far.

But as long as a day at the ball park can keep beating a day at the office, I suppose I'll still be a fan.

Sunday Funnies

Justice Stevens retiring

Thanks for your service from a grateful nation.

“I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” (Justice John Paul Stevens) told (New York Times reporter Jeffrey Rosen) during a (September 2007) interview in his chambers, laughing and shaking his head. “I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative.” Stevens said that his views haven’t changed since 1975, when as a moderate Republican he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Supreme Court. Stevens’s judicial hero is Potter Stewart, the Republican centrist, whom Stevens has said he admires more than all of the other justices with whom he has served. He considers himself a “judicial conservative,” he said, and only appears liberal today because he has been surrounded by increasingly conservative colleagues. “Including myself,” he said, “every judge who’s been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell” — nominated by Richard Nixon in 1971 — “has been more conservative than his or her predecessor. Except maybe Justice Ginsburg. That’s bound to have an effect on the court.”

He was appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 to replace William O. Douglas.

Stevens was able to draw the support of the court's swing votes, now-retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy, to rein in or block some Bush administration policies, including the detention of suspected terrorists following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, its tilt toward protecting businesses from some lawsuits and its refusal to act against global warming.

He also penned the dissent in Bush v. Gore, writing:

What must underlie petitioners' entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

A life well-lived, and time left to enjoy the remaining winter.

A member of a prominent and wealthy Chicago family, Stevens spoke proudly of being a Cubs fan who was at Wrigley Field for the 1932 World Series game when Babe Ruth supposedly pointed to the spot where he would hit a home run. He met many celebrities of the day when they stayed at his family's hotel in Chicago, including aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. ...

Even in his late 80s, Stevens said he swam every day and continued playing tennis several times a week. He described reading legal briefs on the beach, noting his colleagues' jealousy when in court one day he opened a brief and grains of sand spilled out.

Speculation on his successor abounds.

Update: Katie Shellnutt notes that Stevens is the only remaining Protestant on the Court -- all the other justices are Catholic or Jewish, and two of the leading contenders to replace Stevens are Jewish as well.